With spiking rates of transgender children already reported in the United States and the United Kingdom, the CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster, recently noted a sharp rise in children requesting gender “transition” in Canada as well. Children’s clinics, the CBC reported, are seeing “exponential growth in demand for treatment from teens who don’t identify as the sex they were born with.”
Despite the fact that this spike is unprecedented, physicians like Dr. Stephen Feder don’t seem to be too concerned about why it is occurring. Feder serves as the co-director of the “gender diversity clinic” at CHEO, an Ottawa children’s hospital, and he noted that ten years ago the hospital would have seen one or two children per year who “wanted to change their gender or had questions about their gender identity.” In 2018, that number went up to 180.
